Carlsbad girl turns Kelly Elementary trauma into home runs

There was a moment ---- really, a terrifying chain of moments ---- when Brooke Ochoa was locked outside at Kelly Elementary School in Carlsbad on what she now calls the Very Bad Day.

Brendan O'Rourke had already begun shooting on the playground and was down on a knee reloading his .357-caliber Ruger handgun, while school custodian Fern Hartzler unlocked a gate leading to safety.

Brooke will always remember the tremor in Hartzler's hands, how the keys rattled in the lock.

She also recalls that two of her best friends were shot and that it was supposed to have been a special day: Oct. 8, 2010, her seventh birthday.

Brooke described that day to a journalist for the first time Thursday, sitting on the grass at Kelly Elementary, paces away from where she was when the shooting began.

Now 8 years old, she wore a batting helmet during the interview, strawberry blond hair draped straight down over her shoulders and a grin while she talked about baseball.

Softball, she said, just wasn't cutting it.

"It was mostly about ribbons and hair stuff," Brooke said. "I wanted to play competitive."

And compete she has: As the only girl in her Carlsbad Youth Baseball league, Brooke hit three home runs this year and helped lead her team from behind the plate, where she calls out the plays and does her best to run down foul balls. Now she's on the All-Star team.

"We've only lost one game," she declared proudly, glancing at her mom, Tiffany Ochoa.

Brooke is the youngest of three children, an athletic girl who can't stay still. Besides baseball, she enjoys soccer, surfing, skateboarding and the golden retriever, Milo, her parents bought for her after the Very Bad Day.

Brooke is also tough. As her team's catcher, "I've gotten hit in the thigh, the leg, the knee, the funny bone," she said.

The boys like to tease her, but "it's just little teases because they've seen me play" ---- and they know they need her.

"I like the part where you hit a home run or something," Brooke said.

Her team is tied for first in the league's Pinto division, and if the team wins its next playoff game on Tuesday, it'll advance to the world series of Carlsbad on June 2.

It's all enough to put the Very Bad Day behind her.

"I was over there with my friends, passing the ball around," Brooke said, motioning toward the other side of the field, off Kelly and Hillside drives. "We didn't see the man coming. He climbed the fence real quick, and we kind of froze for a second, but then both of my friends started running, so I was like, 'Oh, I should run, as well.'

"At first, I thought it was some kind of drill ---- a man just costumed ---- but it wasn't," Brooke said. "When I figured that out, I started zigzagging so he couldn't get a perfect shot."

One of the yard supervisors was screaming at O'Rourke and the other fainted, Brooke said.

"I made a breakaway to the cafeteria over there," Brooke said, pointing again. "Both of my friends got shot."

She said one girl ran behind a little fence and the gunshot "went right through her arm ---- didn't hit any nerves or anything."

The second girl ran toward the back of the school: "The man saw her running, and the only shot he could get was her arm."

Brooke was spared that day. A lot of children were. O'Rourke's handgun jammed and he tried to run after a few minutes.

"Miss Fern, she's the one that saved me," Brooke said of the custodian. "She was shaking while she turned the key. She saw me coming, so she was struggling to get it unlocked."

A construction worker ushered a group of kids to safety while several others chased O'Rourke down in the street and tackled him. It would be several hours until Brooke was reunited with her panicked mother.

O'Rourke was convicted in March of seven counts of attempted murder with special allegations of gun use. Last month, he was sentenced to 189 years to life in prison for opening fire on a crowd of 230 grade-schoolers at recess.

With the completion of the trial, Tiffany Ochoa said the family have been able to put the ordeal out of their minds. Brooke now attends Magnolia Elementary School.

"She tried to talk to a school counselor, but she didn't like it," Ochoa said. "She wants it to just go away ---- she wants to focus on her sports and her life. She loves playing baseball, loves playing soccer, loves being in a team environment. That's her world.

"For a long time, she'd get up in the middle of the night and have bad dreams," Ochoa added. "And then she didn't want her birthday to come this past year, because it brought too much back."

The mother's emotions still well up, too: anger, then a retroactive terror of what could have been.

"Thank God they didn't call her in to talk about him" on trial, Ochoa said. "They asked us to write a letter and read it when he was sentenced, and I said, 'He's not worth my words, not worth my energy.'

"I didn't understand how scared I should have been ---- that she was so close," she said as Brooke practiced with her team Thursday, digging into a low, aggressive stance in the batter's box. "She'll be right next to me in the car, singing along with a song on the radio, and I'm like, 'What if she wasn't there?' The what-ifs go through your head."

What goes through Brooke's head is much simpler: Maybe the nightmares will stop for good now that O'Rourke is locked up.

She giggles when she pictures it: "He can braid his beard, that's what I'm thinking."